You love the sea.
You say you could spend days just sitting on the shore. You say the constant beat of the waves quenches thoughts, slakes desires. I don’t know, for me it’s just a pool of water.
You love the sea.
You say you could spend days just sitting on the shore. You say the constant beat of the waves quenches thoughts, slakes desires. I don’t know, for me it’s just a pool of water.
The gloaming nightfall, a crescented moon and a gentle blow of the late summer’s wind persuade me to follow the path down to the beach. There are even stars on the sky. Everything needed to feel romantic, and the water is black and turbid, dark enough to become just a black mass on the brink of my vision.
There is a thin noise in the air, a quavering sound. Somebody’s playing a flute. I hope it’s not you – I don’t like the instrument, don’t like how its voice rises and falls, as if trying to reach some height and failing, always failing.
“They are like enchanted beings.”
“Who?”
“The waves.” You gaze past me, and I can see your profile in the bluish dusk. Behind us, above, is the edge of a steep cliff, and the smell of grass dried by the August sun gone mad on the dog-days.
“They are like hands, the foam on the waves – like white hands. Trying to hold on to the rocks, but they can’t, because there are always others behind them who pull them back. And their voices – like victims in the horror movie before they are dragged away by the monster.”
“You hear their voices?” I try to make my tone light-hearted.
“Don’t you?”
“No, not enough to make out the words. You are our sea interpreter.”
The somebody that is playing the flute is above us, walking along the cliff, and the sound vibrates from an intrusive forte to a soft piano. Even the residue of the sunlight has waned off, merged with the dusk, and now it’s only the white shine of the moon and the colourless, varnished surface of the sea.
“It is dreary. Dreary and hopeless.”
“What?”
“What the sea says at night.” I walk up to you to distract you, to give comfort, whatever it is that people do in sympathy, but you don’t seem to care. “It’s not to be understood by human ear.”
I shrug and suddenly feel cold. I don’t know what is there to love, in this sea, in this coastline, where there is nothing but the dim lights in the fishermen’s huts in the distance, and some sleepless loony walking in the grass on the cliff playing his flute and probably spying on us.
“Don’t get frightened.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. It’s because you’re afraid to listen – to hear how peaceful it is, this void. Without sounds, without thoughts, without a measurable depth.”
“Fuck you with your eerie talks. You’re giving me creeps.” My words are very heartfelt. “Fuck you!”
“Yes. Please do.”
The sound of the flute drifts away to the fishermen’s village. The sand under our bare skin is rough and hard.